Cannes likes to return to the same film-makers time after time, but this year none of its established British favourites - Loach, Leigh, Winterbottom and Figgis - has made the cut. Instead, something much more interesting is happening in the festival's lower echelons: four British directors, two of them well-known and two rather less so, have been selected, and while they are all at different stages in their film-making careers, their presence points to a new generation of British cinema beginning to make an impact on the world stage.

That two have emerged from the art world can't be a coincidence. For some years, the YBAs have enthusiastically embraced the medium of film, achieving a kind of breakthrough two years ago when Douglas Gordon's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait played at Cannes to considerable acclaim. Though there have been a few misfires (Tracey Emin's Hot Spot), a new spirit of radicalism has been unleashed. Both Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood have made their films under the aegis of Film4: if nothing else, they will have succeeded if they can import the glamour of more idea-based work into their cinema.

The other two directors have something else in common. Both Thomas Clay and Duane Hopkins know the value of using spectacular photography to underpin stories of moral ambiguity. Clay aroused much hostility with his first film, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael; his second will hopefully showcase his undoubted film-making abilities. Hopkins is the least known, but his debut Better Things displays tremendous assurance.

What unites all four film-makers is a commitment to the high-end art film. In a year when Terence Davies, guru of the more recondite end of British cinema, is back in circulation, it's a relief to report that his spiritual heirs are making their voices heard. Cannes deserves our thanks for this, at least. Here are our ones to watch this year.

The troublemaker: Steve McQueen

"When I was in art school, I wanted to be in film school. When I was in film school I wanted to be in art school," says Steve McQueen, who now comes full circle - an artist taking his film to the world's biggest film festival. As we speak, French subtitles are being hurriedly added to Hunger, his drama set in the Maze prison during the weeks Bobby Sands and nine other republican prisoners went on hunger strike. Of course, McQueen has made films before. He won the Turner prize in 1999, in part for his video Deadpan, in which he recreated a legendary Buster Keaton stunt, standing still in front of a building as it collapsed around him. He has filmed New York from inside barrels (Drumroll), ventured two miles inside a South African goldmine (Western Deep), and far into the Democratic Republic of Congo (Gravesend). None of them count as features though, which means that Hunger will be in the running for the best first film award.

McQueen explains that, when he was 11, he had something like a coming-of-age moment watching the news in spring 1981. There were the hunger strikers and, closer to his home in Ealing, the Brixton riots. A picture of Bobby Sands, the first of the strikers to die, has stuck with him ever since: "It was always in my head, that image." Hunger will now join an ever-growing canon of films about the Troubles, which have, in recent years, tended towards docu-drama - the urge to lay down history or, in some instances, to correct it. That, McQueen says, is not what he was going for. "I just want to examine what is at stake here. Why would you put yourself on the line in such a way - in the most painful way - for your beliefs? Where have you got to?" He was struck by the idea of the unshakeable convictions of young men (Sands was 27 when he died): "That feeling of youth and the feeling of being right, the feeling of that kind of passion, really."

Does he think the film will be controversial? "It's called the Troubles for a reason. It's troubling - it continues to be troubling," McQueen says. He's more interested in his audience than the press, and talks with a total and sincere respect about the people who watch his work. For him, films - art or movies, what's the difference? - act as a mirror. "What gets projected on to the surface of the screen is the audience's reflection. Do you agree with what Bobby Sands did? If you do, there is always doubt. If you don't, there is doubt. It's a difficult thing to think about. And that's why film-makers should be making films."

Others in the McQueen camp seem more jittery about the film's likely reception. Ken Loach took a lot of criticism when The Wind That Shakes the Barley won the Palme d'Or in 2006, but Steve McQueen OBE may prove a trickier target. He was the UK's official war artist in Iraq. (He is still furious that his stamps featuring British soldiers killed in action have not gone into production: "The Royal Mail still haven't come back to me with a definite answer.") His films are reflective and resist simplification. The rights and wrongs of the hunger strikers are thrashed out in a moral argument between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham); McQueen likens it to a philosophical game of chess, or a McEnroe/Connors Wimbledon final.

Working on Hunger was the first time McQueen had been on a film set, or worked with a crew and actors: was it a difficult leap to make? Last year, he went to the Congo to make a film, he says. "Fifty kilometres into the bush with armed guards." Hunger was a breeze by comparison. "If you want a cup of tea, some geezer gives you one. Before you finish it, another guy takes it away. What's there to complain about?"Cath Clarke

The wolf in sheep's clothing: Sam Taylor-Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood's Love You More is a 15-minute tale of first lust, playing in this year's short film competition and apparently every inch the virginal cheap date. But a glance at the credits reveals its behind-the-scenes firepower: Love You More is funded by Film4, scripted by Patrick Marber, and produced by the late Anthony Minghella. The film takes its cue from a Buzzcocks single and finds room for a brief cameo from the band's frontman, Pete Shelley. It looms amid the competition as a wolf in sheep's clothing, a shark among minnows.

A Turner prize nominee, Taylor-Wood once conjured an installation out of a sleeping David Beckham and has suspended herself upside down from the ceiling of her east London studio. She explains that Love You More was conceived as a kind of dress rehearsal for her feature debut - an adaptation of a Julie Myerson novel that Minghella planned to produce. Film4 suggested that she try her hand at a short film first, so Marber pitched in with a story, and Seamus McGarvey (Atonement, The Hours) signed on as cinematographer. Taylor-Wood never expected it to be nominated for the short-film Palme d'Or, and has never even visited the festival before. "It's not the world I've inhabited," she admits. "So I'm coming to it fresh."

This freshness, she says, may well be the ace up her sleeve. Her videos of snoozing celebrities and bowls of rotting fruit have honed her visual sense without burdening her with the usual directorial baggage. "If anything, my background has been a help, not a hindrance," she says. "It means that I come at film-making from a different angle. It means that I probably construct shots differently to someone who has spent three years in film school. The only problem is that I tend to like to get on with things, whereas film-making is such a slow process." With a sigh, she explains that Love You More took five whole days to shoot - "even though it's a film about the energy of a single moment." One worries that the demands of a feature film will have her climbing the walls with frustration.

Not so, says Taylor-Wood. She plans to shoot the Myerson adaptation later this year. "And the whole collaborative process is not something I have any trouble with. My work has always been collaborative. You can't make films and not love working with people." As if to prove her point, she breaks off from our conversation to berate the chattering colleagues who have invaded her studio. Keep quiet, she tells them: this is important. "I'm doing an interview about the Palme d'Or!" she says. "I'm talking about me!" Xan Brooks

The provocateur: Thomas Clay

British critics haven't been as enthusiastic about Thomas Clay as their continental counterparts. "Horrible and objectionable," "video-nasty territory" and "a sequence excruciating beyond any in memory" were some of the responses to the bloodcurdlingly violent finale of The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005). Other critics reacted badly to his perceived pretentiousness: his choice of a title, with its echoes of Werner Herzog's documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, and his nods toward other arthouse film-makers.

Three years on, the softly spoken Clay sounds bemused by the outrage he provoked. "I was just trying to make what I felt was a worthwhile a film," he says, "a film that I myself would want to watch. I didn't, maybe, anticipate the level of controversy Carmichael seemed to inspire in some places."

He thinks his second feature, Soi Cowboy, will make more comfortable viewing. "I'll have to wait and see what happens, but it doesn't contain the same level of graphic violence as Robert Carmichael." The new film takes its name from a street in Bangkok's red-light district, and is in two parts. The first half, the writer-director explains, is about a "bar girl and her client, looking at the details of their life together", shot in the spirit of classic European arthouse cinema - in particular, the work of Clay's beloved Antonioni. It isn't, he says, necessarily a study of a white western male exploiting a Thai woman. "It's not, despite initial appearances, necessarily clear who is exploiting who, and who is complicit in what." The second half is more "inspired by genre cinema. It's like a gangster narrative."

Is his British background important to his filmmaking? "Obviously, I was born in England and brought up there. That is always going to be part of my character. At the same time, I try to look wider than that." Clay's wife is Thai and he now lives in Thailand. Soi Cowboy was made with a Thai crew, including cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who has shot Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. "Obviously, I had to be aware of my own perspective, my own possible biases as a foreigner in that environment," he says.

Despite the mixed response to his first film, Clay has fond memories of Cannes and is looking forward to returning. He cites the first festival screening of Robert Carmichael as a special moment: "People in the end weren't sure how to react, but it was just the experience of showing it. You've spent two years working on a film and finally you get to sit there with an audience and see how they respond. That is the moment I will remember." Geoffrey Macnab

The bard of beauty and boredom: Duane Hopkins

Of all the Brits in Cannes, Duane Hopkins has had the least help in getting here. A 34-year-old ex-art college student, with just a couple of short films under his belt, Hopkins has come a long way in a short time. He grew up in Chipping Camden in the Cotswolds, and made his first, award-winning short in 2001. Called Field, it set a style and mood that Hopkins has pursued ever since - through a second short (Love Me or Leave Me Alone), and now in his debut feature, Better Things.

Hopkins' method is to combine beautifully measured photography of the rural English landscape with simple, almost rudimentary narratives about the disaffected, disconnected teenagers who live there. Boredom and cruelty dominate their world, a counterpoint to the sublime natural beauty all around them.

Better Things is, as you would expect, considerably more ambitious thematically than Hopkins's short films, delving unapologetically into a heroin and pills subculture that Hopkins says was around him as he grew up. "The two things don't mix in most people's minds," he says. "When you think of heroin, you think of inner cities and economic deprivation - but of course you still have all that in the Cotswolds. It's not the tourist idyll it's made out to be. Every time I came back to the area I would hear that someone I knew had died through hard drug use. Then my little brother started to tell me the same stories. It was happening in his group of friends as well."

Hopkins's cinematic response to all this is one of high-minded aestheticism. He is unashamed in his enthusiasm for what he calls "film in its purest form, just images and sound". "I look at the UK film scene, and think Better Things is quite different - it's not just about straightforward narrative; it's trying to investigate the form and do something challenging and innovative. Film can aspire to the same things as painting; it can move into the abstract."

For him, Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher) was the trailblazer - "she's just fantastic" - and he cites a number of other short film-makers and first-feature directors as evidence that something fundamental may be happening. If there is a new generation of British cinema coming to the boil, then Hopkins is very much at its centre.Andrew Pulver